Later On

Okay, I’m trying one:

Savory Port-Mushroom Chicken

Olive-oil spray
1/4 medium onion, thinly sliced
1 cup bow-tie pasta (farfalle)
1/2 to 3/4 lb chicken breasts or thighs
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 large Portobello mushroom, halved and thinly sliced
2 Tbsp ruby port
1 tsp balsamic vinegar
1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
1/2 tsp Dijon mustard
2 tsp olive oil
one 3-inch fresh rosemary sprig, or 1 tsp dried rosemary, crushed
2 c cut green beans or snow pea pods

Preheat oven to 450º F.

Spray the inside and lid of a cast-iron Dutch oven with olive oil.

Scatter the onions in the pot. Add the pasta and 1/3 c of water. Stir to coat the pasta and distribute it in an even layer.

Add the chicken to the pot and lightly season with salt and pepper. Arrange the mushrooms in a layer on top of the chicken.

In a small bowl, mix the port, vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, mustard, olive oil, and 1 Tbsp of water. Stir with a whisk or fork to emulsify the mustard, then drizzle into the pot.

Add the carrots and tuck the rosemary spring into a crevice. Top with a layer of green beans.

Cover and bake for 45 minutes, or until 3 minutes after the aroma of a fully cooked meal escapes the oven. Serve immediately.

That’s from Yarnell’s Glorious One-Pot Meals. I did notice I had to reject quite a few recipes as unsuitable to a weight-loss diet, though I think they’ll be fine on maintenance.

In this making of it, I used whole-wheat rotini as the pasta, and 1/2 lb chicken breast. (This serves two—or, for me, two meals.) I didn’t have Worcestershire sauce (I’m planning to make some), so I used A1 sauce. I used dried rosemary and fresh green beans, which I cut into short sections. Cutting the carrots was made much easier by the Borner Swissmar V-Slicer.

It was rather fun building the layers. I didn’t want to cook the half chicken breast (8.2 oz) in one piece, so I cut it into strips and they made a nice layer.

It’s cooking now.

UPDATE: Not bad at all, but probably a stretch to term it “glorious.” OTOH, I did substitute A1 for Worcestershire sauce. Still, I get the idea and I think with my own choices of herbs and spices it can be much better. And what I have is not bad at all.

It was a good idea to cut the chicken into strips, and I think next time I will cut it into chunks to make it easier to spoon out the finished dish: you have to push the spoon down to the bottom so you can get something from each layer.

I got The Wife (the family Web expert) to touch up this theme ("Enterprise") a little, and I think I’ll stick with it for now. Hope you like it.

Bob, she tried to fix the font. Is this okay?

Not for terrorism, though: probably because his defense would be that we (via the CIA) ordered him to do terrorist acts. Peter Kornbluh and Julia E. Sweig report in the LA Times:

In the trial of Luis Posada Carriles, which began this week in El Paso, U.S. prosecutors will for the first time publicly present evidence of the anti-Castro militant’s long career of political violence. But although the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has identified Posada as "a danger to both the community and national security of the United States," and his case is being handled by the Justice Department’s counter-terrorism division, he is not being prosecuted as a terrorist. Instead, Posada is charged only with immigration fraud as well as several counts of perjury relating to his role in a series of 1997 hotel bombings in Havana.

Still, this is a groundbreaking case. It is notable that the U.S. government, whose Central Intelligence Agency trained, paid and deployed Posada to conduct violent operations against Cuba in the 1960s, has finally decided to prosecute him. And the case is remarkable for the substantive cooperation it has produced between the Cuban and U.S. governments.

However tendentious the analogy, the government of Cuba has described Posada as its Osama bin Laden: a violent fanatic who committed unspeakable crimes and has yet to pay the price.

According to declassified CIA documents, Posada was recruited and trained by the agency in the use of explosives and in guerilla warfare during the early 1960s. In November 2000, he was caught in Panama City with a carload of dynamite and a plastic explosive as part of a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro at an Ibero-American summit. (He was convicted and sentenced to eight years in prison but was pardoned in August 2004 by then-Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso.)

Posada has also been linked to repeated terrorist attacks against Cuban targets. Declassified FBI and CIA intelligence reports point the finger at Posada as the mastermind of the worst pre- 9/11 act of aviation terrorism in the Western Hemisphere: the midair bombing of a Cuban airliner in 1976 that killed all 73 people on board. In 1997 and 1998, by his own public admission, he orchestrated a series of seven bombings of tourist hotels and restaurants in Havana, killing a 32-year-old Italian businessman and injuring 11 other people.

So, is he repentant? "I sleep like a baby," Posada declared in a candid interview with the New York Times in July 1998. "That Italian was sitting in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is sad that someone is dead, but we can’t stop," he warned.

Such admissions, along with a dossier of U.S. government evidence, should have provided grounds for the George W. Bush administration to detain Posada under the USA Patriot Act when he showed up in Miami in March 2005. Instead, more than two months after he arrived, the government charged him only with immigration violations, perhaps because Posada had long been a celebrated figure in Florida, lauded by many of his Cuban exile comrades as a hero in the cause of bringing down the Castro regime. The Obama Justice Department, in April 2009, added several perjury charges relating to statements Posada made under oath relating to his role in the hotel bombings.

With such historical and political baggage surrounding Posada, the Obama administration should be commended for finally prosecuting him. Havana seems to agree, despite its disappointment that more serious charges against Posada weren’t filed.

Since Posada’s arrest in Miami, Cuba has given considerable assistance to U.S law enforcement authorities. Teams of Justice Department lawyers and investigators have traveled to Havana at least four times to interview witnesses and review evidence. Cuba was even ready to receive Posada’s lawyers in January 2010 (although they ultimately declined to go). The Cuban government has turned over video of the crime scenes and more than 1,500 pages of investigative reports on the hotel bombings. Cuba has allowed the FBI to question and depose Posada accomplices arrested in Cuba. And it also agreed to allow two lead Cuban police investigators to travel next week to El Paso to testify about the forensic evidence they found.

How much of the evidence provided by Cuba will be introduced by prosecutors . . . 

Continue reading.

I was looking for this recipe (aka Carbonnades à la Flamande), reminded of it by something I read in Scott Feldstein’s blog. At last I’ve found it, in Myra Waldo’s Beer and Good Food, an excellent little cookbook:

4 lbs beef (brisket, eye round, chuck)
4 cups sliced onions
4 Tbsp butter
1 Tbsp flour
2 cups (16 oz) beer
1 Tbsp vinegar
2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp pepper
1 tsp sugar
2 bay leaves
1/2 tsp thyme
3 Tbsp minced parsley

Buy first-cut brisket or have the other types cut 1 inch thick. Cut into 12 pieces.

Use a Dutch oven or heavy saucepan and brown the onions in the butter. Remove the onions and brown the meat in the remaining butter. Sprinkle with the flour. Add everything else (the onions, beer, vinegar, salt, pepper, sugar, bay leaves, thyme, and parsley). Cover and cook over low heat 3 hours, or until meat is very tender.

Serves 6-8.

This is extremely tasty and an old standby. Absolutely wonderful on a cold day. It occurs to me now that after adding all the ingredients, the dish could be cooked in the oven (200ºF or 8-10 hours or 300ºF for 4-5 hours) as in a slow cooker.

Thanks to Joel for passing along this link. Anne Harding writing for CNN’s Health.com:

Spending lots of free time glued to the TV or computer screen can hurt your heart and shorten your life, no matter how much exercise you get when you’re not riding the couch, a new study suggests.

People who spent at least four hours per day watching TV, playing video games, or using a computer for fun were more than twice as likely as those who kept their recreational "screen time" under two hours to experience a heart attack, stroke, or other serious cardiovascular problem, the study found. Couch potatoes were also about 50 percent more likely to die of any cause during the four-year study.

The link between screen time and heart problems barely changed when the researchers factored in the amount of moderate-to-vigorous exercise the study participants did, suggesting that the health benefits of exercise don’t cancel out all that time in front of the tube or computer. (The researchers also controlled for obesity, smoking, diabetes, social class, and other factors.)

The study doesn’t prove that watching TV or playing computer games is inherently unhealthy, says the lead researcher, Emmanuel Stamatakis, Ph.D., an epidemiologist at University College London, in the U.K. The real culprit may be what people tend to do during those activities: sit.

Why is sitting harmful? It’s not entirely clear, but animal studies have shown that prolonged sitting slows down the action of an enzyme (lipoprotein lipase) that breaks down fats in the blood, such as cholesterol and triglycerides. When the enzyme activity slows, levels of those substances climb. This is a "very plausible explanation" for the findings, Stamatakis says…

Continue reading. The article includes this link: Health.com: 9 surprising heart attack risks, and the risk from taking calcium supplements surprised me, though my doctor already told me to cut the calcium supplement to 500 mg QD and to take the calcium with a Vitamin D supplement of 2000 IU.

Or maybe I’m just paying more attention. And certainly the Edith Grossman translation is excellent.

Early in the novel Don Quixote and Sancho Panza encounter a funeral party with a story: the poet Grisóstomo had fallen in love with the unsurpassed beauty of Marcela, a young woman of wealth who has elected to live alone as a shepherdess. Grisóstomo becomes a shepherd to court her and is rejected and ultimately dies. His friends blame Marcela with some anger for being arrogant, disdainful, and so on. Then Marcela herself shows up at the funeral—incredibly beautiful—and makes a strikingly modern speech about women’s rights—specifically, how a woman has a right to lead her own life and is not required to return the love of anyone who falls in love with her. Guilt for Grisóstomo’s death properly belongs to Grisóstomo himself.

All that sounds right to modern ears, though it must have been startling at the time. The Marcela leaves the funeral, and such is her beauty that several of the men there are inclined to follow her, even though she has specifically said she wishes to be alone.

Don Quixote quickly makes himself her champion, and holding his lance astride Rocinante, he blocks the way and says that, if anyone attempts to follow Marcela, who wishes to be alone, they will have to answer to him.

No one’s interested in the challenge, and they all leave. Whereupon Don Quixote immediately turns and follows the way Marcela went, calling for her. I had to laugh, after Don Quixote’s fine speech and actions defending Marcela’s desire for solitude, at the picture of Don Quixote, followed by Sancho Panza, riding through the wood and yoo-hooing. "Marcela? Yoo-hoo, Marcel-l-l-l-la."

They don’t find her and eventually lie down to rest in a pleasant meadow at one end of which are some ponies. Sancho doesn’t bother to hobble the aged and skinny Rocinante, who is old and chaste. But lo! Rocinante does indeed get flirty with the pony mares and he is beaten for his ardor, as are Don Quixote and Sancho Panza when they try to rescue him.

I’m sure Rocinante’s little fling is in some way an echo of Don Quixote (also old and chaste) following after Marcela. "Yoo-hoooooo. Marcel-l-l-l-la?"

Maybe you have to read it for yourself, but I got a chuckle—first from Don Quixote’s artless pursuit—no comment made, he simply goes to find her after everyone’s left, in spite of his rousing defense of her solitude—followed immediately by Rocinante imitating his master, as it were.

Extremely smooth and easy shave today. I began with an abundant and orange-fragranced lather that the Omega 643167 worked up from Prairie Creations Orange tallow-based shave soap. Three smooth passes with the Pils holding a newish Swedish Gillette blade, a splash of Royall Mandarin, and I ready to rush about picking up the apartment for the cleaning ladies.

I had intended to use the other tiny brush. Tomorrow, I expect.

Played with and fed Molly.

Picked up prescriptions.

Went to Monterey Peninsula College (no more "Community" in the name) and picked up parking permit and found my classroom.

To Whole Foods for my target recipe in Glorious One-Pot Meals (for those following along at home: Savory Port-Mushroom Chicken, p. 154)

To the library to return two books and donate a box of books

Now I’m cooking lunch and thinking about the afternoon.

Excellent shave today. The Lucretia Borgia worked up a wonderful (and wonderfully fragrant) lather from Honeybee Soaps Lilac shaving soap, three passes with a Swedish Gillette blade in the iKon open-comb razor, and a good hearty splash of Floïd—definitely a mentholated aftershave in my view.

This was excellent, so I’m having it twice for two reasons, appropriately enough. Regarding the chop: apparently the standard size for a boneless pork chop is now 8 oz—half a pound. That’s two servings, and I cut such chops in half. So in addition to the other “half” ingredients, I used 1/2 center-cut boneless pork chop.

4 oz center-cut boneless pork chop, trimmed of fat and cut into small, chili-appropriate chunks
1/4 large onion, chopped relatively small
4 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 green bell pepper, chopped relatively small
1/2 jalapeño, minced
1/2 can Ro-Tel tomatoes of some sort
1/3 c canned beans (rinse if appropriate)
2 tsp spicy olive oil
1 tsp chili powder (vary to taste)
dash liquid smoke

Heat oil in sauté pan or saucepan. Add onion and sauté until onion begins to turn golden and caramelize.

Add chili powder, stir and sauté briefly, then add the pork, garlic, pepper, and jalapeño and stir.

Sauté that for several minutes, turning occasionally. You want some browning to occur.

Add the tomatoes, beans, and liquid smoke, stir, cover, and simmer for 30 minutes.

That’s one serving—i.e., that’s dinner.

Sometimes canned beans are in a sauce you want to keep, sometimes they’re in a cooking liquid that you want to drain and rinse away.

UPDATE: For the second half, all as above, except:

When you begin to cook the onions, add also 6 kumquats, each sliced crosswise into several slices. Cook with the onion until both onion and kumquats begin to caramelize.

After it had simmered 10 minutes, I added 2 Tbsp ketchup, stirred it in, and continued to simmer on slightly higher heat with the lid ajar.

This is best one yet.

Where is this country going in terms of authoritarian government unchecked by law?

From the update to the above column:

(1) The Los Angeles Times has a surprisingly strong editorial today condemning what it calls the "indefensible" conditions of Bradley Manning’s detention;

(2) McClatchy‘s Nancy Youssef has a very good article examining why American journalists — in contrast to journalists from around the world — refuse to defend WikiLeaks from government attacks;

(3) Forbes notes that in the wake of speculation that the DOJ’s pursuit of Twitter data may include the names of those who follow WikiLeaks on Twitter (I personally don’t think it does include that), WikiLeaks quickly lost 3,000 followers on Twitter, presumably people now too afraid to continue to follow them; and 

(4) The Miami Herald‘s Carol Rosenberg notes the latest glorious milestone of our National Security State:  "Guantanamo prison camps enter their 10th year tomorrow."

I mentioned that my Pilates trainer has a new device: CoreAlign. I got some work on it today, and I think it will help restore correct posture.

Here’s a thorough review of the long-handle straight-bar iKon from a guy who apparently doesn’t use double-edged blades regularly.

An article at Telegram.com:

Parents of children with autism need science — good science.

Unfortunately, this baffling disorder has for years been thrown into further confusion by a “study” linking the mumps-measles-rubella vaccine with autism spectrum disorder.
That now thoroughly discredited study was published in The Lancet in 1998 by British researcher Dr. Andrew Wakefield and 12 co-authors — most of whom have since withdrawn their names from the work. The respected medical journal itself published a partial retraction in 2004, and fully retracted the study last February.

If parents take away no other message from this awful tale, they need to hear this loud and clear: There is absolutely no credible link between the MMR vaccine and an increased risk of autism.

What’s new in the case is that the 1998 paper has been exposed as not merely sloppy science, but an outright fraud. While the findings have been strongly questioned for years — because other labs were unable to reproduce the results, methodologies were improper and serious conflict-of-interest concerns arose — the death knell to this research dead end was sounded loudly Wednesday when the British Medical Journal published a report by investigative journalist Brian Deer. The report demonstrated that Dr. Wakefield falsified the medical histories of all 12 patients in the study, and that he was hoping to sue vaccine manufacturers and to create a vaccination scare.

He did set off that scare. Countless well-meaning parents, especially in Britain and the U.S., chose not to vaccinate their children, believing they were sparing them from the risk of developing autism. Instead, they were exposing them to the risk of contracting one of the serious diseases against which they should have been vaccinated. Further, a generalized, and dangerous, distrust of all vaccines began to form among the public.

Dr. Wakefield, who now lives in the U.S., is denying wrongdoing, and continues to suggest “Big Pharma” is just trying to protect itself.

Don’t believe it. The preponderance of hard evidence says otherwise.

It is incredibly galling when a breach such as this occurs in science, a rigorous pursuit for which facts are fundamental and reason is embraced. Progress in science brings not only the delight of new knowledge, but the hope of some measure of help to mankind. Dr. Wakefield’s fraud was the opposite of all this. It was an atrocious betrayal of his profession, it wasted research time and money that could have been much better spent, and it helped create a public health setback with harmful repercussions for countless people.

This drawn-out episode is a case study in the clash of emotion with the slow progress of steady, careful science. Parents desperately want to protect their children; and parents of children diagnosed with autism or a related disorder understandably seize on any indication of a possible explanation. A vaccine-autism link idea was plausible as a hypothesis, but it was soundly vetted and rejected by proper science — yet it became a monster myth nevertheless.

The truth is that scientists still don’t know what causes autism spectrum disorder. We must place our trust, our patience, and our funding with researchers who are gradually teasing out the real answers to this urgent question, using real science.

I saw her perform with her trio in Santa Cruz a few years back. Fantastic.

Interesting article by Chris Woolston in the LA Times:

Of all fields of medicine, psychology seems especially prone to fads. Freudian dream analysis, recovered memory therapy, eye movement desensitization for trauma — lots of once-hot psychological theories and treatments eventually fizzled.

Now along comes mindfulness therapy, a meditation-based treatment with foundations in Buddhism and yoga that’s taking off in private practices and university psychology departments across the country.

"Mindfulness has become a buzzword, especially with younger therapists," said Stefan Hofmann, a professor of psychology at Boston University’s Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders.

Mindfulness therapy encourages patients to focus on their breathing and their body, to notice but not judge their thoughts and to generally live in the moment. It may sound a bit squishy and New Agey to some, but Hofmann and other experts say mindfulness has something that discredited theories of the past never had: solid evidence that it can help.

"I was skeptical at first." Hofmann said. "I wondered, ‘Why on Earth should this work?’ But it seems to work quite well."

Hofmann and colleagues burnished the scientific credentials of mindfulness therapy with a review article in the April issue of the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. After combining results of 39 previous studies involving 1,140 patients, the researchers concluded that mindfulness therapy was effective for relieving anxiety and improving mood.

The treatment seemed to help ease the mental stress of people recovering from cancer and other serious illnesses, but it had the strongest benefits for people diagnosed with mood disorders, including generalized anxiety disorder and recurring depression.

Jordan Elliott, a 26-year-old marketer for a New York publishing company, said mindfulness training had helped pushed his once-disabling anxiety — about work, the weather, the meaning of life — into the background. "The anxiety is still there, but it’s not as bad as it was," he said.

Elliott started getting one-on-one therapy four years ago at the American Institute for Cognitive Therapy in New York. It was hard at first, partly because he was skeptical of the technique and partly because he didn’t feel particularly mindful. "I was such a nervous wreck I could hardly sit still for three minutes," he said.

Now he starts every day with a 10-minute meditation. He sits cross-legged in his apartment, TV and music off, and thinks about his breathing. . .

Continue reading. I’m convinced by the demonstration in my last Pilates session that (a) breathing correctly and deeply is therapeutic, and (b) I did not know how to breathe properly and I bet many people share my ignorance. Our modern lifestyle (and furniture) undercuts the correct exercise of many natural functions, including breathing (and sleep and eating and…).

The Search function stopped working in the theme that I was using, so I’ve moved to a new theme.

This morning shave shows some ignorance. For example, I’m not sure about that tiny Omega brush: is it all badger? or a badger/boar combination? I think the latter, but I’m not sure. (I have another tiny Omega brush, which I’ll use tomorrow to compare.) At any rate, I got very nice lather from the soap—and I don’t recall which soap now inhabits this bowl. Previously, it was The Soap Opera’s Himalaya shaving soap, but I think I switched it out, and I don’t recall for what. Still: good lather. Then three passes with the gold-plated iKon and its Swedish Gillette blade, followed by a good splash of Alt Innsbruck.

UPDATE: Using the Search function I have now regained with the new theme, I see that the soap is Gentlemen’s Best Chilled — see this post.

I think I definitely should see 42nd Street more often. It is indeed the epitome of the backstage musical, with many excellences all its own. 

My stepfather became quite deaf late in life because he spent his life working around (loud) power tools before we knew enough to wear hearing protectors. But now kids are going deaf in their teens. Virginia Heffernan has a report in the NY Times Sunday Magazine:

One in five teenagers in America can’t hear rustles or whispers, according to a study published in August in The Journal of the American Medical Association. These teenagers exhibit what’s known as slight hearing loss, which means they often can’t make out consonants like T’s or K’s, or the plinking of raindrops. The word “talk” can sound like “aw.” The number of teenagers with hearing loss — from slight to severe — has jumped 33 percent since 1994.

Given the current ubiquity of personal media players — the iPod appeared almost a decade ago — many researchers attribute this widespread hearing loss to exposure to sound played loudly and regularly through headphones. (Earbuds, in particular, don’t cancel as much noise from outside as do headphones that rest on or around the ear, so earbud users typically listen at higher volume to drown out interference.) Indeed, the August report reinforces the findings of a 2008 European study of people who habitually blast MP3 players, including iPods and smartphones. According to that report, headphone users who listen to music at high volumes for more than an hour a day risk permanent hearing loss after five years.

Maybe the danger of digital culture to young people is not that they have hummingbird attention spans but that they are going deaf.

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